Paedophilia is the sexual attraction, or fetish, directed toward prepubescent children. Like most sexual disturbances, it seems to affect exclusively men. It may well be that paedophilia, like (male) homosexuality, is set by puberty and unchangeable. Of course, it is not the case that every paedophile must act on his desires, but those that do typically find it very hard to stop, as if it were an addiction. The striking thing, though, is how rare those really are relative to the magnitude of the publicd hysteria over them.

The word and concept are misused, though, in a misandrist fashion, to refer to sexual desire of adult men toward adolescent but potentially fertile women, which is quite normal. While whether a man ought ever to act on those feelings is legitimately debatable, their existence is not.